I’m currently reading How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton. When talking about how Proust helps to expand the world around us by pointing out the things we tend to miss, he writes the following:

An effect of reading a book which has devoted attention to noticing such faint yet vital tremors is that once we’ve put the volume down and resumed our own life, we may attend to precisely the things the author would have responded to had he or she been in our company. Our mind will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness; the effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, and realizing that the silence only existed at a particular frequency and that all along we in fact shared the room with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm. Our attention will be drawn to the shades of the sky, to the changeability of a face, to the hypocrisy of a friend or to a submerged sadness about a situation which we had previously not even known we could feel sad about. The book will have sensitised us, stimulated our dormant antennae by evidence of its own developed sensitivity.

I’ve not read anything by Proust, but this sums up exactly how I feel about Virginia Woolf. Proust faced criticism because he spent thirty pages describing himself getting out of bed in the morning, he was still writing his book In Search of Lost Time when he died, at which point it was seven volumes, each of around 500 pages, so you can understand the frustration of a reader who thought he dwelled too long on trivial matters. Rather than moving too slowly and taking in every little detail, I find that Woolf packs her books so densely that every page takes an age to read because there is so much between the lines, so much depth in every sentence. She concentrates exclusively on those ‘faint yet vital tremors’ and skims over surface appearances. It’s more like reading poetry than reading a novel, and in books like The Waves she almost jettisons the plot altogether in favour of a series of vaguely chronological moments which almost totally lack context or setting; she is interested only in these important events, not in the trivialities in between.

When I finish one of her books, or a book by one of the few other authors that moves me in the way Button describes, I feel impassioned, as if the world around me has taken on an extra dimension. Woolf  does this by drawing out so much of what is going on behind the scenes of our senses, our desires, our relationships. Of course, the new dimension and level of understanding she provides fades with time and sadly my dreams of having Woolf-like conversations and experiences disappear quite quickly. I think that the great author often has to sacrifice a certain amount of the ‘normal’ wavelength in order to tune into these new deeper levels of experience, as is demonstrated by the frequently difficult lives such authors lead. Both Woolf and Proust had extremely tragic lives, Woolf ended up drowning herself, and Proust was constantly sick, neither seemed able to live out the rich existences they managed to create for their fictional characters.

I see education as a similar tool for opening up new dimensions to my experience. I try to learn the names of trees and flowers and animals so that I can enhance my perception of the world around me. By learning new subjects it helps me to notice things I had previously overlooked. For example, in the past when looking at a forest I would have just seen a green mass of trees, at most being able to separate the pines form the broad leaved trees, but now I have learnt the names and characteristics of just a few species I have opened up a whole new level of pleasure in perception as I walk through the woods. Not only do I see all the species, but I see them changing, I see the Horsechestnuts dying everywhere, and it makes me realise that these trees are growing and dying, whole species are growing and dying. Away from nature in a cityscape I can learn about media and advertising, about typography and methods of communication, about architecture and history; this turns previously background advertisements into interesting subjects for some primitive form of pop-psychoanalysis. I can think ‘why are they advertising that in that way?’, ‘does it work?’ or ‘why do i find this advert seductive?’. It all adds an extra dimension to the world around me.

The real skill of authors like Woolf is that they go beyond this intellectual enhancement and they tap into the deeper realms of thoughts and perceptions. Education tends to enhance the world outside of myself, but Woolf can enhance the world inside of me, teaching me more about myself which I can then in turn use to better understand the people and environments outside. As Button says, it sensitises us, not only to the world around us, but more importantly to the world within ourselves.